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EG Vocab
| Term | Definition | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Sublimate | Meaning 1: to pass or cause to pass directly from the solid to the vapor state Meaning 2: to divert the expression of (an instinctual desire or impulse) from its unacceptable form to one that is considered more socially or culturally acceptable | Ex: These ice crystals are temporary from day to day. They develop at night when the air is at its coldest but melt or sublimate away during the day in warmer air or sunlight. |
| Efficacy | Meaning: The ability to produce a desired or intended result. | Ex: “The efficacy of the new marketing plan has not been proven.” |
| Amorphous | Meaning: Without a clearly defined shape or form. Vague; ill-organized; unclassifiable. | Example: “The amorphous package caused alarm to many people in the terminal.” |
| Handsel | Meaning 1: a gift made as a token of good wishes or luck especially at the beginning of a new year Meaning 2: something received first (as in a day of trading) and taken to be a token of good luck Meaning 3 a: a first installment b: a token or sample | Ex: Celebrating the New Year in the Scottish tradition, Jessica gave out a handsel of one silver dollar coin to each of her nieces and nephews |
| Campestra | Meaning: of or relating to fields or open country : rural | Ex: Just about any amateur naturalist who pays attention to the birds … in campestral Maine will find an eye-opener or two here. |
| Rapporteur | Meaning: A person who gives reports (as at a meeting of a learned society) | Ex: The rapporteur was particularly scathing about bungled efforts to streamline the way welfare payments are made to individual recipients after delays in a shift to a new system … led thousands of people to fall into poverty. |
| Proliferate | Meaning 1: To grow or cause to grow by rapid production of new parts, cells, buds, or offspring Meaning 2: to increase or cause to increase in number as if by proliferating. | Ex: The surge in the price of bitcoin, and of other cryptocurrencies, which proliferated amid a craze for initial coin offerings, prompted a commensurate explosion in the number of stories and conversations about this new kind of money…. |
| Charisma | Meaning 1: personal magic of leadership arousing special popular loyalty or enthusiasm for a public figure (such as a political leader) Meaning 2: a special magnetic charm or appeal. | Ex: The young singer had the kind of charisma that turns a performer into a star. |
| Imbroglio | Meaning 1a: an acutely painful or embarrassing misunderstanding Meaning 1b: a circumstance or action that offends propriety or established moral conceptions or disgraces those associated with it : scandal Meaning 1c: a violently confused or bitterly c | Ex: He was close to scandal—GOP chairman during the Watergate years, vice president during the Iran-Contra imbroglio—yet was not tainted by it. |
| Sleuth | Meaning 1: to act as a detective: search for information Meaning 2: to search for and discover | Ex: For more than five decades, Morse has sleuthed out long-lost family trees for a living. From his home base here in Haywood, Morse travels the world tracking down missing heirs. |
| Raddled | Meaning 1: being in a state of confusion: lacking composure Meaning 2: broken-down, worn | Ex: We were met at the door by a raddled old man who turned out to be the actor's father, and who in his day had also been an estimable presence on the London stage. |
| Gargantuan | Meaning 1: tremendous in size, volume, or degree : gigantic, colossal | Ex: Due to our gargantuan scope, Houston is a haven for live music. As the nation's fourth-largest city, we have become a destination for touring acts by default—it certainly isn't because of our collective reputation as an audience…. |
| Syllogism | Meaning 1: a deductive scheme of a formal argument consisting of a major and a minor premise and a conclusion Meaning 2: a subtle, specious, or crafty argument Meaning 3: deductive reasoning | Ex: In some states … there are calls to eliminate courses in literature, philosophy, history and other fields of the humanities. Students want and need technical, employable skills, not sonnets or syllogisms, it is said. |
| Liaison | Meaning 1: a binding or thickening agent used in cooking Meaning 2a: a close bond or connection: interrelationship Meaning 2b: an illicit sexual relationship: affair Meaning 3a: communication for establishing and maintaining mutual understanding and c | Ex: Brennan and Alejandro Castro agreed on a series of steps to build confidence. One called for the Cubans to post an officer in Washington to act as a formal liaison between the two countries' intelligence agencies |
| Farouche | Meaning 1: unruly or disorderly: wild Meaning 2: marked by shyness and lack of social graces | Ex: Though she wrote three 'novels' (more extended free associations than novels as we know them), she is the best thought of as a poet of small, farouche poems illustrated with doodles…. |
| Teetotaler | Meaning 1: One who practices or advocates teetotalism: one who abstains completely from alcoholic drinks | Ex: The names Rockefeller and Diego Rivera are forever intertwined thanks to the Mexican artist's infamous mural at Rockefeller Center, which the family commissioned in 1932 and had demolished two years later—due in part to its depiction of the teetota |
| Nomothetic | Meaning 1: Relating to, involving, or dealing with abstract, general, or universal statements or laws | Ex: First, they can expect to find an investigation of the ways in which males and females differ universally: that is, of the nomothetic principles grounded in biology and evolutionary psychology that govern sex-differentiated human development. |
| Demotic | Meaning 1: of, relating to, or written in a simplified form of the ancient Egyptian hieratic writing Meaning 2: of or relating to people and especially their speech: popular, common Meaning 3: of or relating to the form of Modern Greek that is based o | Ex: When it came time to make her own wine …, she continued taking the natural path, bent earnestly to the task of revitalizing California winemaking with a demotic, punk-rock spirit. |
| Largesse | Meaning 1: liberal giving (as of money) to or as if to an inferior; also: something so given | Ex: Thanks to their grandparents' largesse, both children were able to go to college without going into debt. |
| Portend | Meaning 1: to give an omen or anticipatory sign of | Ex: The old saying about a halo around the moon portending rain has some truth to it: the halo is caused by cirrus clouds drifting 20,000 feet First Article is appended below as well. |
| Senescence | Meaning 1: the state of being old: the process of becoming old Meaning 2: the growth phase in a plant or plant part (such as a leaf) from full maturity to death. | Ex: The results revealed that some trees have shorter or longer sleep periods than 12 hours and others show slow continuous movement in one direction probably because of disease or senescence. |
| Ratiocination | Meaning 1: the process of exact thinking: reasoning Meaning 2: a reasoned train of thought | Ex: Ratiocination is a trained, disciplined procedure of arriving at truth—a use of reason and perspicacity so precise it's almost supernatural. |
| Mettlesome | Meaning 1: full of vigor and stamina: spirited | Ex: He was convinced that [the director] John Huston decided after the first week that the film was a dud and if he could kill or seriously injure his star it would be canceled and the insurance would pay up. He had Hurt riding over rough terrain on me |
| Condone | Meaning 1: to regard or treat (something bad or blameworthy) as acceptable, forgivable, or harmless | Ex: The school handbook explicitly states that bullying will not be condoned. |
| Abstruse | Meaning 1: difficult to comprehend: recondite | Ex: Today's physics breakthroughs tend to be so abstruse that summarizing them is like trying to explain the financial-derivatives market to a three-year-old. |
| Prescind | Meaning 1: to withdraw one's attention Meaning 2: to detach for purposes of thought | Ex: But to frame an abstract idea of happiness, prescinded from all particular pleasure, or of goodness, from everything that is good, this is what few can pretend to. |
| Wiseacre | Meaning 1: one who pretends to knowledge or cleverness; especially: smart aleck | Ex: A French nobleman-soldier who is mad for love and poetry in roughly equal measure, a chivalric wiseacre adept at wordplay and swordplay alike, Cyrano requires an actor who is both physically and intellectually nimble |
| Finicky | Meaning 1: extremely or excessively particular, exacting, or meticulous in taste or standards Meaning 2: requiring much care, precision, or attentive effort | Ex: The young boy was a finicky eater, and his parents found it challenging to come up with ideas for healthy meals that he would enjoy |
| Bardolater | Meaning 1: a person who idolizes Shakespeare | Ex: The song retells the story of"Othello," but in such subtle language that only bardolaters are likely to recognize it. |
| Teem | Meaning 1: to become filled to overflowing: abound Meaning 2: to be present in large quantity | Ex: On Friday, Tselikis stood in front of the Red's Best stall at Boston's Public Market, offering up tidbits about lobsters as they teemed inside a tank |
| Apotheosis | Meaning 1a: The perfect form or example of something: quintessence Meaning 1b: the highest or best part of something: peak Meaning 2: elevation to divine status: deification | Ex: In 2018, this adaptation [of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451] speaks to the apotheosis of social media, to the approach of authoritarianism, and to any other anxieties about the self-surveillance state that you might harbor. |
| Cacophony | Meaning 1: harsh or discordant sound: dissonance; specifically: harshness in the sound of words or phrases Meaning 2: an incongruous or chaotic mixture: a striking combination | Ex: But never in their most uneasy dreams did they expect the cacophony—a word which here means 'the sound of two metal pots being banged together by a nasty foreman standing in the doorway holding no breakfast at all'—that awoke them. |
| Gibbous | Meaning 1a: marked by convexity or swelling Meaning 1b: of the moon or a planet : seen with more than half but not all of the apparent disk illuminated Meaning 2: having a hump: humpbacked | Ex: The fresh layer of snow glistened under the light of the waxing gibbous moon. |
| Heartstring | Meaning 1: the deepest emotions or affections — usually used in plural | Ex: There are two moments in 'Mary Poppins Returns' when the grown-ups watching really lose it: Dick Van Dyke's arrival and when Angela Lansbury starts singing. Those are playing on a lifetime of heartstrings. |
| Disavow | Meaning 1: to deny responsibility for: repudiate Meaning 2: to refuse to acknowledge or accept: disclaim | Ex: It seems the college's president is now trying to disavow her previous statements. |
| Obsequious | marked by or exhibiting a fawning attentiveness | Not pleasing others enough amounts to surliness, pleasing too much makes one obsequious—you have to be friendly, but not too friendly. The sweet spot in the middle is where you want to be. |
| Two-bit | Meaning 1 : cheap or trivial of its kind: petty, small-time Meaning 2 : of the value of two bits | Ex : In 1956, he published Allen Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems at City Lights Books, which was then, [Lawrence] Ferlinghetti says, both a one-room bookshop and a 'two-bit poetry press' in San Francisco. |
| Zero-Sum | Meaning 1: of, relating to, or being a situation (such as a game or relationship) in which a gain for one side entails a corresponding loss for the other side | Ex: Among the greatest risks posed by a new recession is that governments may engage in a zero-sum war for spending. Unable to overcome the technical and political hurdles to creating more money at home, they might opt to suck in money from abroad. |
| Bathetic | Meaning 1: characterized by triteness or sentimentalism | Ex: The TV people inevitably reduce history to a series of bathetic tropes: the flag waving in slow motion, the rescued puppy, the evacuee given the star treatment of American Idol. |
| Animadversion | Meaning 1: a critical and usually censorious remark — often used with on Meaning 2: adverse criticism | Ex: Some of his contemporaries and erstwhile friends, meanwhile, displayed considerable frankness in what they wrote. They did not count on Hemingway reading their animadversions on his character and talents while sitting in a café in Venice. |
| Delate | Meaning 1: accuse, denounce Meaning 2: report, relate | Ex: Hepzibah was brought to trial after being delated for the practice of witchcraft |
| Newspeak | Meaning 1 : propagandistic language marked by euphemism, circumlocution, and the inversion of customary meanings | Ex: He'd lost his birthplace after the Yalta agreement when his native region was incorporated into the Soviet Union. Since his family was Polish, they decided to join thousands of other 'repatriates' and re-settle in the area in Poland that the communist |
| Wormless | Meaning 1: Ex: chiefly British: lacking intelligence: stupid | It would be difficult to think of many things more wormless than driving a car while blindfolded |
| Leviathan | Meaning 1a: often capitalized Leviathan: a sea monster defeated by Yahweh in various scriptural accounts Meaning 1b : a large sea animal Meaning 2 : capitalized Leviathan: the political state; especially: a totalitarian state having a vast bureaucracy Mea | Ex : Fossils of the ancient leviathan were unearthed from 480-million-year-old rocks exposed on a hillside in southeastern Morocco |
| Sentient | Meaning 1: Meaning 2 responsive to or conscious of sense impressions : having or showing realization, perception, or knowledge: aware Meaning 3 : finely sensitive in perception or feeling | Ex: Frightened of the potential that a vast automated intelligence represents, we often portray sentient intelligences as the equivalent of machine gods—ones that, in many cases, find us wanting |
| Vox Populi | Meaning 1 Ex : Popular sentiment | While the Academy is certainly no stranger to controversy, they surely don't want to court it openly with hires that turn out to be less than ideal. Not to mention, the Academy Awards, on the whole, have become subject to somewhat of a critical reevaluati |
| Borne | Meaning 1: transported or transmitted by — used in combination | Ex: By 2050, half the world's population could be at risk of mosquito-borne diseases like dengue fever or the Zika virus, new research suggests. |
| Muse | Meaning 1: to become absorbed in thought; especially: to think about something carefully and thoroughly Meaning 2: archaic: wonder, marvel Meaning 3: to think or say (something) in a thoughtful way | Ex: 'Television brings people together, but television can also tear us apart,' [Jimmy] Kimmel mused. |
| Strategem | Meaning 1a: an artifice or trick in war for deceiving and outwitting the enemy Meaning 1b: a cleverly contrived trick or scheme for gaining an end Meaning 2: skill in ruses or trickery | Ex: As a stratagem to get the kids to do their chores, Melissa persuaded them to have a race to see which child could finish first. |
| Incipient | Meaning 1: beginning to come into being or to become apparent | Ex: I read the motive as being dictated by the necessity of stifling an incipient scandal in order to protect the magic of the marketplace. |
| Footle | Meaning 1: to talk or act foolishly Meaning 2: to waste time: trifle, fool | Ex: I left the convent with an ability to curtsey, two rubbish A-levels and a large repertoire of slightly scandalous songs. I footled around for a year, wasted three years at university, footled around a bit more and then finally did what I'd wanted to d |
| Decoct | Meaning 1 : to extract the flavor of by boiling Meaning2: Ex boil down, concentrate | The cooking liquor he decocts from roasted red peppers … gives surprising oomph to roasted rice purée and royal red potato. |
| Magniloquent | Meaning 1: speaking in or characterized by a high-flown often bombastic style or manner | Ex: The magniloquent sportscaster sometimes got so carried away with his monologues that he would forget to describe the action on the field. |
| Litmus Test | Meaning 1: a test in which a single factor (such as an attitude, event, or fact) is decisive | Ex : For Curtis, the litmus test of good barbeque ribs is whether or not they have that moist fall-off-the-bone quality. |
| Rowel | Meaning 1 : to goad with or as if with a pointed disk at the end of a spur Meaning 2 : vex, trouble | Ex : He folded the book shut, touched his hat, moved to the wagon, and roweled the horses around |
| Scrumptious | Meaning 1: delightful, excellent; especially : delicious | Ex: I prepared a scrumptious chocolate cake for our grandfather's 80th birthday. |
| Hoodwink | Meaning 1 : to deceive by false appearance | Ex: All would be wise to remember that we're especially likely to be hoodwinked on April Fools' Day |
| Ettiquette | Meaning 1: the conduct or procedure required by good breeding or prescribed by authority to be observed in social or official life | Ex: As a matter of etiquette, contemporary bosses are expected to rein in their swagger and talk up their team. Some … even project vulnerability, not invincibility. 3. 4. 5. |
| Comminute | Meaning 1: to reduce to minute particles: pulverize | Ex : Type III fractures are comminuted (involve multiple broken pieces of bone), which lead to mechanical blocks to motion and significant elbow joint and ligament damage. |
| Brummagem | Meaning 1 Ex : not genuine: spurious; also: cheaply showy: tawdry | The members of the bachelorette party stumbled out of the limousine with the bride wearing a brummagem tiara and sash |
| Arduous | Meaning 1: hard to accomplish or achieve: difficult Meaning 1b: marked by great labor or effort: strenuous Meaning 2: hard to climb: steep | Ex: Every summer, right before the beginning of the new school year, the football team begins its season with "Hell Week," an arduous six days of conditioning and training. |
| Fantods | Meaning 1: plural fantods a: a state of irritability and tension Meaning 1b: fidgets Meaning 2: an emotional outburst: fit | Ex: The movie's graphic imagery gave me the fantods—I had to turn it off. |
| Opusculum | Meaning 1: a minor work (as of literature) — usually used in plural | Ex: The book is a collection of opuscula written by the author between her two major novels. |
| Moiety | Meaning 1a : one of two equal parts: half Meaning 1b : one of two approximately equal parts Meaning 2 : one of the portions into which something is divided Meaning 3 : one of two basic complementary tribal subdivisions | Waiting on the shore were members of the Raven moiety, counterparts to the Eagles in the traditional world of the Haida Indians. |
| Thole | Meaning 1: chiefly dialectal: endure | Ex: There was now temptation to resist, as well as pain to thole. |
| Cubit | Meaning 1: any of various ancient units of length based on the length of the forearm from the elbow to the tip of the middle finger and usually equal to about 18 inches (46 centimeters) | Ex: The teacher explained that the ancient Egyptians did not measure things in feet and yards as we do but rather calculated measurements using the cubit |
| Gullible | Meaning 1: easily duped or cheated | Ex: "I'm not so gullible as to think I really won this cash sweepstake," said Aunt Mary, though she went ahead and opened the envelope that told her she had won, just in case it wasn't a scam. |
| Veritable | Meaning 1: being in fact the thing named and not false, unreal, or imaginary — often used to stress the aptness of a metaphor | Ex: The availability of movies and TV shows on streaming services is a veritable merry-go-round these days, with so many titles coming and going that it's hard to keep things straight. |
| Intoxicate | Meaning 1 : poison Meaning 2a : to excite or stupefy by alcohol or a drug especially to the point where physical and mental control is markedly diminished Meaning 2b : to excite or elate to the point of enthusiasm or frenzy | The sweet, aromatic juice of each squashed berry intoxicated me for a second. |
| Resurrection | Meaning 1a: (capitalized Resurrection) : the rising of Christ from the dead Meaning 1b: (often capitalized Resurrection) : the rising again to life of all the human dead before the final judgment Meaning 1c: the state of one risen from the dead Meaning 2: | Ex: Every few weeks I get a press release declaring that coal is going to make a comeback, but reports of the resurrection have been greatly exaggerated. |
| Ecstatic | Meaning 1: of, relating to, or marked by ecstasy | Ex: Greta and Paul were ecstatic when their daughter called to tell them that they were soon going to be grandparents. |
| Propitious | Meaning 1: favorably disposed: benevolent Meaning 2: being a good omen: auspicious Meaning 3: tending to favor: advantageous | Ex: With the economy emerging from a recession, it was a propitious time to invest in a start-up. |
| Adversary | Meaning 1 : one that contends with, opposes or resists: an enemy or opponent | Ex: Despite the fact that they have been political adversaries for years, the two-state senators worked together to rally bipartisan support for the bill. |
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